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It starts like this, innocent:
a fleeting touch on the transporter pad, meant as comfort after the death of an away team member;
shoulders that rub inadvertently when they lean together across the science console, awaiting sensors to finish the surface scan of an uncharted planet;
hands locked in a death grip to pull each other upright after the ship makes a stomach-turning lurch.
At first, Jim thinks nothing of it. When, across the bridge, their eyes meet more often than required of a captain and commander, he tells himself it’s because they’re a strong command team. It’s curiosity. Spock is a scientist. He’s studying Jim from a prescribed distance, a human research subject in his native habitat. Simple. Uncomplicated. As his commanding officer, Jim wants him to feel accepted among the crew.
As a human, he wants to be his friend.
When it continues, he calls it habit. To match his gaze is easy. Reassuring. Spock doesn’t look away like a human might. If he realizes that Jim stares at him more than other humans, he has likely rationalized it as a quirk of personality, like the lying he chastises Jim for but (Jim suspects) secretly admires.
Spock indulges him on the bridge with looks cast over his shoulder, sharp features softened by a near-invisible smile, more sensed than seen. Jim thinks he’s probably the only crew member who can detect it.
Chess bonds them, the competition between logic and undisciplined strategy. When they play, Spock is at his most relaxed. The early games take place in the rec room. One match turns into two, three, ten, fifty, and Jim loses count of who wins and who demands a rematch. One night, Spock suggests a game in his quarters. Quieter than the rec room, he says. They can speak freely to one another as senior officers.
“Logical,” Jim says and accepts.
Spock seems surprised by how often Jim outwits him. And pleased, Jim thinks, to serve under a human clever enough to best a Vulcan.
It pleases Jim to have Spock to himself in these too-few moments.
His directness is comforting. Jim asks his opinion about ship’s business even when his mind is already made up. Sometimes he’ll find himself smiling at him without realizing it. Times Spock turns serious eyes toward him, warmth blossoms in Jim’s chest, and the sight of his back curved over his computer or the empty science console causes an alien twitch in Jim’s stomach that he has no name for.
When touches begin to linger, Spock does not protest, likely excusing it as another point of his captain’s humanity. Jim is certain he has no personal reference points for human touch besides his mother. A pair of trembling hands against his shoulders after a dangerous away mission, leaning against each other in the turbolift after a situation that would’ve gotten any other starship blown up—Jim touches him in these brief moments, strokes his arms as he drags his hands away. Hurts no one but himself.
They’re stranded on an asteroid with Zefram Cochrane and observe his amorphous Companion, the way the two interact, fitting against and around and within one another—each complete in the other’s presence.
A symbiosis, Bones says.
Jim calls it love.
Suddenly he has a word for what has been building since the Enterprise left spacedock, grateful that Spock cannot read thoughts, as the Companion can read Zefram’s.
But if the affections of a faceless alien life form are so transparent, Jim’s must be as well. Can Spock see it on his face? He must. As a scientist, he must perceive the way Jim softens in his presence and no other. He must have theories about Jim’s feelings toward him, even if he cannot understand them.
What they have is practical and satisfying. Surely Spock must value that?
Jim’s body grow hot and cold. The asteroid’s climate, nothing more. Spock is attending to the shuttle craft and, for once, Jim is relieved he cannot meet his eyes.
Despite the courage his Starfleet record credits him, Jim Kirk does not act on it.
He relishes their long looks, the way Spock has begun to touch his arm, how he feigns surprise when Jim tips his king with a casual “Checkmate.” Wishes it were only this easy to take Spock for his own.
He fights daytime fantasies of being thrust up against the wall of the turbolift on its ascent to the bridge, of Spock’s hot mouth on his neck just long enough to elicit a groan, torn away as the doors open to leave Jim panting and hard. The fantasies follow into night, Spock into his dreams. He visits regularly, coaxes him over the edge in sleep, whispering “Captain” into his ear, filthy in its propriety, tongue wet along the curved edge.
Jim wakes sweating, out of breath and alone.
He has witnessed Spock burn with the blood fever of his species. He can feel what Jim feels, but does he want to? Would he want Jim? That’s the question. This is no casual encounter. It can’t be rushed.
But there’s time, Jim tells himself, and says nothing.
The five-year mission’s remaining time passes swiftly.
One day, they reach its end.
The ship, their fine lady, docks for repairs and refitting, and the crew departs in waves, bags slung over shoulders like tourists emptying from a cruise ship. They say goodbyes. Some temporary, some for the last time. Bones says they’re going camping once the weather agrees, but Spock hasn’t shared his future plans with Jim. Where he once plunged defiantly forward at every turn, he struggles to picture the next year without Spock’s guidance, his cool logic, how he grounds Jim with the silent raise of an eyebrow.
They leave the ship and debrief. There’s a celebratory feast. Later, over a final game of chess (on Earth, on solid ground, in short-term crew lodging that reeks of disinfectant), Jim braces himself to confess these feelings he’s been carrying, but though the moves come easily, words do not.
He steals glances at Spock who is focused on the board, still in uniform although they’re technically on leave. This shade of blue looks good on him. His brows are furrowed in concentration. How would it feel to reach over the board, trace a thumb over them, smooth the crease in his skin, tell him without words what Jim keeps buried?
What would he say, if anything? Is their closeness merely a symptom of half a decade in limited space? Jim has to believe there’s more between them than chess. He watches Spock’s long fingers pinch his bishop and remove it from the board. If only they could meld in the Vulcan way, if only Spock could see the things Jim can’t say.
He moves his queen.
“Check.”
Catches his eye. Grins. For a long moment, so long it burns, Spock holds his gaze. Without breaking eye contact, he makes a single move.
“Checkmate.”
What? Impossible. But Jim studies the board, spots his mistake. By the time he looks up, Spock has risen from his chair. Without the excuse of ship’s business, he has no reason to keep him longer. The words that have been in his throat all evening die there.
“I am going to miss these matches of ours, Mr, Spock.”
“I regret to lose such a fine opponent.”
“Our friendship, Spock. Has...has it been satisfying to you?”
“Indeed. I have found it beneficial.”
“I wish it to continue, for us to continue to be friends, even when we don’t serve together. I want that very much.”
Spock regards him for a long while, and Jim allows himself to hope. He nods and Spock nods, ducks his head. Shadows steal across his face.
“It has been an honor serving under you, Captain.”
“An honor indeed.”
Jim squeezes his shoulder, fingers brushing the side of his neck. Spock stiffens. It passes just as suddenly. He steps back and offers the Vulcan salute.
“Live long and prosper.”
“You too.” Jim’s fingers stretch wide in mimic of the gesture. “Keep in touch.”
Three years go by slowly and all at once.
The Enterprise is in dock again, being refit for another mission. Jim won’t be on board this time. The promotion to rear admiral keeps him at headquarters behind a desk. Admirals don’t command starships, and he’s the youngest in Starfleet history.
A bittersweet honor to accept without Spock at his side.
Jim assists the new captain with the refit. Assist is the wrong term. Decker humors his visits. They fill the days. Stepping onto the Enterprise, knowing she is no longer his, fills Jim with a profound loss. But more than that, it reminds him of the way his life is altered.
For months after he left, Jim saw Spock everywhere. The shadow lingering in his office doorway, the urgent message on his PADD, the figure retreating across Starfleet’s campus. Ghosts that are less common now, but Jim sees him on board the ship, in what’s left behind: a science station where he no longer bends to view the computer screen, the bright blue of a science officer’s new uniform, an empty table in the rec room where they once played chess. From the center of the bridge, Jim looks back over his shoulder, expecting (impossibly) to find him standing there.
There has been no word of him, only rumors that he returned to Vulcan. So many times Jim has thought of sending a message through Ambassador Sarek or an official Starfleet communication to ask why he left without so much as a farewell. After so many years of living with humans, he can’t pretend to be ignorant of how it would make Jim feel.
Cultural differences only account for so much.
The chess set, positioned on a shelf above his desk, is fringed with dust. The cleaning staff would take care of it, but Jim has asked them not to touch it. He hasn’t been sleeping. Sometimes he hallucinates, visions so alarmingly clear it’s as though he has been momentarily transported a great distance. Bones would quarantine him at the base’s clinic if he knew, and they only last for seconds, so Jim says nothing.
Today it’s a wide, flat staircase on a dusty red plant. He gazes up at three people standing at the top, at the feet of a colossus. A world he recognizes in an instant, even though he has never been here, not to this exact place.
Spock, he thinks, closing his eyes and imagining them together. I wish you were here to help me understand. I wish you would tell me why you left.
A single word drifts back from across the void.
t’hy’la
It’s no word he’s heard before, not in all of his negotiations or language training. Vulcan in origin, he assumes from the consonants, though he cannot guess at its meaning. It does not appear in Starfleet’s official dictionary, and the universal translator gives no Terran equivalent.
Jim writes it off as a side effect of insomnia, a phrase he’s heard Spock say in the past and misremembered, latent grief over their broken friendship, and goes in pursuit of coffee.
Jim’s wish to return to space is granted when a mysterious cloud entity threatens Earth. The Enterprise, the only starship in range, is sent to intercept it, and he exercises his right as admiral to take over command.
It’s been two, two-and-a-half years since he’s logged a star hour. Stepping onto her bridge, his bridge, is a bittersweet homecoming. He feels older down to his cells. Two crew members—one of them the new science officer—have just died in a sudden transporter accident. He should mourn them.
He feels nothing.
Bones, on hearing this, replies that Jim’s been a right sonofabitch lately and blames it on stress.
“You’re an admiral, Jim, not a lost cause. You’re thirty-seven years old. Now shake it off. You’ve faced worse adversaries.”
He jabs Jim in the neck with a hypo, something to take the edge off of the situation. The drugs have taken effect by the time the request comes in, a long-range Federation shuttle asking permission to lock on.
The vision, when it appears, is the exterior of the Enterprise. He knows before the shuttle comes alongside who is on board.
He’s here, he thinks. It’s time.
When Spock stands on that bridge again, Jim gapes at the sight of him, the severe black robes stark against the turbolift doors. He’s lost weight, cheekbones more pronounced than when they’d served together. Harsh, almost corpse-like, but Jim’s looks have changed over the years too. He jumps to his feet, extends a hand that goes unclaimed.
Spock regards him as though Jim is a stranger, as if they parted as less than friends, this man who holds his heart.
Voyager Six (V’Ger, it calls itself; a computer, a thing of logic) crossed the universe to return home after more than three hundred years. Unlike the Companion they encountered during their five-year mission, V’Ger cannot feel or ache or love, but the devotion to its creator called it home.
Something in the encounter changes something within Jim, unlocks it, dislodges his fear. He’s already lost Spock once. If he must lose him again, let it be honestly.
He’s been injured, though not fatally. For the last few hours he’s been asleep in a biobed, stripped of the dark robes he arrived in. Nurse Chapel has him in some sleeveless white hospital getup, and the bright overhead lights have chased away every shadow.
Jim stands at his side. Bones has encouraged him to wait, to let him sleep. Plenty of time to reminisce once they’re back on Earth, but Jim made that mistake once.
He fights the urge to take one of Spock’s hands. And then, as if by some miracle, he doesn’t have to fight any longer. Spock wakes, and when he does he reaches out, reaches for Jim. With their hands clasped, he laughs, a rare and wonderful sound.
Later, when it’s just the two of them in the captain’s quarters, not a chess board in sight, Jim fits a hand to Spock’s cheek.
“I missed you,” he says, words coming easy. “I swear that I could see Vulcan through your eyes at times, Spock. A staircase, an immense statue, taller than any I’ve seen. Tell me, am I crazy?”
The look on Spock’s face is wonder. He takes a breath through parted lips, shakes his head.
“I went there to purge myself of all emotion, but I failed.”
“What stopped you?”
“Your thoughts.”
“You could hear them?”
Spock nods. “Fragments. I initially questioned my sanity. Whether or not I could hear your true thoughts, my attachment to you was too strong. I could not complete the final ritual.”
“And now? How’s your sanity now?”
“I should not have gone without speaking to you.” He shuts his eyes. “I was ashamed of my feelings.”
“And I should’ve spoken to you about mine.” Jim strokes a thumb along his cheekbone where he’ll put his lips in a while. “I thought I heard you, once. Spock, in Vulcan, is there a word that sounds like t’hy’la?”
If there was any doubt that the visions had been connected to him, it evaporates in wide-eyed shock that turns glassy. Spock’s mouth is on his. The word enters Jim’s mind again and he no longer wonders at its meaning.
They start like this.